"The Kid" Blasts a Winner: Ted Williams's 110 Game-Deciding Home Runs

By Bill Nowlin

As if Ted Williams’s numbers needed any help, recent research reveals that 110 of his 521 career home runs—more than 20%—were game-winners. “The Kid” Blasts a Winner, by Red Sox guru Bill Nowlin, tells the story of every one of them. Williams’s first game-winner came just 10 games into his career, a mammoth blast, likely the longest ball ever hit at Briggs Stadium. His last came more than 21 years later, the 520th of his career, a 2-run shot that carried the Red Sox to a 2-1 win against the Senators. For those two winners the 108 in between, Nowlin provides background on the teams and opposition pitchers, recounts the key plays and players, and describes each home run in glorious detail.
“The Kid” Blasts a Winner was a labor of love for baseball historian and Ted Williams authority Nowlin and the detail he provides is astounding. The narrative leans heavily on the use of newspaper accounts of the games—with headlines and excerpts adding color and depth to the narrative. Numerous quotes from Williams are also included, both from the newspaper stories and later reminiscences from The Splinter.
Also included are a section that breaks down the game-winning home runs by opponent, inning, walk-off, and other categories, features on The Kid’s .406 season and unforgettable All-Star Game homers, and an amazing notes section that runs more than 50 pages, packed with background stories about Williams and the Red Sox, stats and trivia, and hyperlinks to dozens of related articles. Taken on its own, the end notes read like a condensed version of Williams’s unmatched career, full of little-known facts and sidebars that also serve to recreate baseball’s classic era of the 1940s and 1950s.
“The Kid” Blasts a Winner IS a winner—a front-row seat to some of the greatest games played by one of baseball’s greatest players. If you thought the legend of Ted Williams could grow no larger, get ready to become even more awed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Summer Game Books
• Release date: May 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781955398176

Bill Nowlin

BILL NOWLIN confesses to have left Game Three of the 2004 ALCS before it was over - due to a 13-year-old son at home with a friend. But since the 1950s he has attended countless Red Sox games at a place he often calls his "second home." He waited 59 years to see the Sox win it all. He is one of the founders of Rounder Records; the one Hall of Fame into which he was inducted is the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. He has written and edited many books, mostly on baseball and mostly for SABR, but has not gone far in life - he lives in Cambridge, maybe 10 miles from where he was born in Boston.

Book preview

THE KID

BLASTS A WINNER

(With permission from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.)

Ted Williams on Hitting

I said it 30 years ago and I steadfastly believe it today. In fact I’ve said it so often it could probably serve as my epitaph: Hitting a baseball is the single most difficult thing to do in sport.¹

Williams’s three golden rules of hitting were: (1) get a good ball to hit; (2) proper thinking at the plate; (3) be quick with the bat.²

It takes more than natural ability to excel as a hitter, he stressed. You’ve got to be smart. Hitting is 50% from the neck up, and knowing what’s going on is 50% of the battle.³

Introduction

There is no question that Ted Williams emphasized the mental part of the game. Fifty years after publication, his book The Science of Hitting remains something of a Bible for batters.

Based on what research we do not know, he wrote in The Science of Hitting, I had a higher percentage of game-winning home runs than Babe Ruth.⁴

That was an intriguing assertion. Was it true? Winning a game, however one does it, is a good thing – for the winner. Ted Williams hit 521 home runs during his major-league career. How many of them were game-winning home runs? And how many did Babe Ruth have?

For that matter, what is a game-winning home run? Certainly, a home run hit in the bottom of the ninth inning that gives your team at least a one-run margin of victory is a game-winning homer. Likewise, a solo home run in the top of the first inning would be the game-winning home run if the game ends with the score 1-0. But there are many other possibilities that present themselves.

According to the definition I decided to use, the first game-winning homer Ted Williams hit was on May 4, 1939 in Detroit. It was in the 10th game of his career. He hit it in the top of the fifth inning. The 20-year-old rookie had already hit a two-run homer in the fourth. That one cut the Tigers’ lead to 4-2. Now he was up again in the very next inning. Joe Cronin had just singled in two and tied the score. The Kid hit a three-run homer that drove in two other Hall of Famers – Jimmie Foxx and Cronin – and gave the Red Sox a 7-4 lead in the game. The final score was 7-5. Clearly, a game-winning homer.

How am I defining a game-winning home run?

A game-winning home run is defined as a home run that provides the final margin of victory in the game, at least one more run than the opposing team scored.

It is not my goal to create a new statistic here, but only to explore something that struck me as worth exploring.

What this is not intended to be is a rehash of a short-lived official statistic from a few decades ago known as the game-winning RBIs. There was a statistic by that name which was introduced by the Elias Sports Bureau and used from 1980-1988 and then abandoned. It was defined in Rule 1004-a as the RBI that gives a club the lead it never relinquishes.

It calculated things in a different way. That definition would say that Ted Williams provided the game-winning RBI in the game of September 23, 1939, when he hit a two-run home run in the third inning. That gave Boston a 2-0 lead. It was a lead they never lost. The Red Sox added seven more runs in the bottom of the fifth. But the final score was Boston 10, Philadelphia Athletics 8. Obviously, many more runs scored after the first two. His two-run homer gave the Red Sox a lead they never lost, but the hit that drove in the ninth Boston run – the run that ultimately made the difference between a win and a loss – was Bob Johnson’s sacrifice fly in the seventh inning.

The game-winning RBI stat was criticized for not being sufficiently dramatic and not capturing clutch hitting. I’m not sure it was intended to do either, but it seemed to fall short on more than one basis. Two articles bearing on the 1980s stat appeared in the New York Times⁵ and in Baseball Prospectus.⁶

I don’t know what definition Ted Williams may have been using when he wrote his book.

Using my definition, I asked Tom Ruane of Retrosheet if he could provide a listing of Ted Williams homers that fit the bill. He could, and he did. The list is 110 home runs long.

Each one is written up in this book in capsule form. A lengthier version of each one has been written for SABR’s Games Project and can be found, by date, on the SABR website here: https://sabr.org/gamesproject. Scroll down on the page and look under Browse the Games Project. Looking first at the decade in question, you will be able to find the writeups. Most of them are ones that I wrote, but there are a few which others in SABR wrote up before I started on this book. All of the entries in this book were written by myself and specifically for this book.

Hopefully, reading through these games will prove enjoyable. Red Sox fans in particular may enjoy this book, given that every game here is, by definition, a Red Sox win. Reading of 110 Red Sox wins will, for many, be an enjoyable experience. Writing them was.

Ted Williams himself – despite being a player for the Red Sox in four decades (his career began in 1939 and ended in 1960) – never saw the Red Sox win the World Series. He was born in San Diego and was only 12 days old when the Red Sox won the 1918 World Series. He died in July 2002, 27 months before the end of the magical 2004 Red Sox season.

But he won a lot of games for the team. He won games in different ways – sometimes a single did the trick. Once it was on a bases-loaded walk. But there were 110 times that he won a game with a home run – a solo homer, a two-run shot, a three-run homer, or a grand slam. One of the solo homers was an inside-the-park home run, and that one clinched the American League pennant in 1946.

A higher percentage than Babe Ruth? Of Ted Williams’s 521 home runs, 110 of them were game-winners. That translates to 21.11% – just over 20% of the homers he hit were game-winning homers. Using the definition I supplied, Tom Ruane also provided statistics comparable to Williams for the other 500 home run hitters. Herm Krabbenhoft calculated all of Ruth’s home runs.

Yes, Ted Williams had a higher percentage than Babe Ruth. In fact, we see that only one player on the 500+ homer list topped Ted Williams – Eddie Murray – which is interesting because Murray always had the reputation of being a clutch hitter.

Digging more deeply and considering all who hit 400 or more home runs, we find two other players who reached the 20% threshold: Adrian Beltre (97/477 = 20.33% and Willie Stargell (93/465) = 20.00%.

Of course, for a team to win a game, it takes more than one person hitting a home run. Even a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth doesn’t itself win the game if your pitching has given the opposition more than a four-run lead. A solo home run might win a game that had been 3-3, but those earlier three runs had to have scored before your solo homer could make the difference. Naturally, playing on a mediocre team is not going to help put you in a position to win as many games in this fashion. The contributions of your teammates – pitching, defense, and offense – all are part of the picture.

1939

Preseason

The first game-winning home run that Ted Williams hit in a Red Sox uniform came on his very first at-bat in New England. It was a first-inning grand slam hit in Worcester, Massachusetts during a preseason exhibition game at Fitton Field, the Red Sox playing against the Holy Cross Crusaders baseball team on April 14, 1939.

On base were Jimmie Foxx, Joe Cronin, and Jim Tabor. Bobby Doerr was on deck. The Kid faced Holy Cross pitcher Mike Klarnick.

Williams homered, and it was no towering, wind-blown fly. On the contrary, Ted’s thump … sailed over the head of Hank Ouelette, playing a deep center field, and carried to the reaches of the football gridiron.i It was, wrote the Worcester Gazette, one of the longest seen at Fitton Field.ii

The final score was 14-2, Red Sox. The grand slam was the game-winning hit. Williams drove in another run later in the game.

Despite Williams being full of confidence, his head-down home run trot was the picture of modesty. (Leslie Jones photograph, Boston .Public Library)

iJ. Earl Chevalier, Red Sox Beat Holy Cross, 14-2, in Exhibition, Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican , April 15, 1939: 9.

ii Circuit Blow by Williams Routs Purple, Worcester Evening Gazette , April 15, 1939: 8.

1939

Rookie Explodes on the Scene

Since winning the World Series back in 1918, the Red Sox had spent 15 years never getting higher in the standings than fifth place. After they had begun to rebuild under new owner Tom Yawkey, and a couple of fourth-place finishes in 1934 and 1935, they reached second place in 1938. Things were looking up. The 1939 season was Ted Williams’s rookie year and he arrived at Spring Training a highly touted and brash 20-year-old kid from San Diego. The year before, he had won the Triple Crown with the Minneapolis Millers in the American Association, batting .366 with 43 homers and 114 RBIs.

Could he live up to the press hype in Boston? He certainly could. Williams put up one of the best freshman seasons of all time, setting a set a rookie for RBIs in a season that still stands. Joe Cronin (107) and Jimmie Foxx (105) both drove in over 100 as well, and The Kid hit 31 homers (8 game-winners). Boston won 89 games, but they still finished a distant second, 17 games behind the Yankees, who completed the year with their fourth consecutive championship.

Red Sox 7

Detroit Tigers 6

May 4, 1939 — Briggs Stadium, Detroit

Boston Red Sox rookie Ted Williams was 20 years old when he first played in a game at Detroit’s Briggs Stadium. It quickly became his favorite ballpark in which to hit.

Williams — The Kid — had won the Triple Crown in the American Association in 1938, with 43 home runs among his contributions to the Minneapolis Millers. Williams batted left-handed and was a pull hitter. The overwhelming number of home runs he hit went to right field, or right-center.

Over his first eight games in the major leagues, the only home run he had hit was on April 23, his fourth game, off Bud Thomas of the Philadelphia Athletics at Fenway Park. It was a two-run homer in the first inning of a game the Red Sox lost, 12-8.

Williams faced right-hander Roxie Lawson in the 10th game of his career. Lawson was pitching in his eighth year in the big leagues and had more than 600 innings of experience under his belt.

His first time up, in the first inning, Williams hit one out of Briggs Stadium — up and over the right-field roof, but foul by inches.⁷ He then lined out to center.

Hitting a ball over the right-field roof was quite a feat in itself, even if foul. It was 325 feet to right field and 440 feet to straightaway center, with right-center listed at 375 feet. And the rooftop was more than 100 feet above field level.⁸

On a 3-and-2 count in the fourth inning, with Boston player-manager Joe Cronin on base, Ted’s towering smash landed atop the right-field roof, nearer center field than right, and bounded back into the playing field only because the eaves of the roof slant downward in that sector. As the crow flies, that belt was good for 360 feet without even figuring altitude.⁹ The Boston Herald agreed: The ball had landed on top of the 120-foot-high third and last deck of the grandstand in right-center, above a spot on the field 360 feet from home.¹⁰ In perspective, 120 feet is about triple the height of Fenway Park’s Green Monster.

It was a dramatic drive, a two-run homer that halved the Tigers’ lead to 4-2.

Ted came up again in the fifth inning. Lawson had walked Doc Cramer, given up a single to Joe Vosmik, and walked Jimmie Foxx. Cronin hit a bases-loaded single to score two runs and tie the game. Bob Harris was brought in to relieve. He had only 15-2/3 innings of major-league experience, but had been with Toledo in the American Association in 1938 and certainly knew about Ted Williams. The righty, who had turned 24 just three days earlier, pitched around Williams, and the count went to 3-and-0.

Harris likely had seen Titanic Ted’s first two drives out of the park, one foul and one fair. Tigers catcher Rudy York certainly saw them. Harris, on in relief with the score 4-4, had to worry about Foxx and Cronin on base. Williams recounted the story to reporters after the game: When the count was three and oh, I got the sign from Joe to take a shot at the next one, cripple though it was. [Detroit catcher Rudy] York was kidding me all along. Now he says, ‘Three and nothing, kid. What are you going to do? Hit?’ and I answered him that I always told the truth and that I was going to hit the next pitch. He didn’t believe it, called for the fast one, it was in there and I hit it.¹¹

This one hadn’t landed on the roof; it went clear out of the park. The Globe described it: It was a climbing liner — as much a liner as a drive could be which cleared a 120-foot barrier, straight as a string, over the whole works in right field, about a dozen feet fair. According to eye-witnesses outside the park, it landed across adjoining Trumbull Ave. and bounded against a taxi company garage on the other side on the first hop.¹²

So you weren’t kidding, after all? said York as Williams crossed home plate.¹³

At 120 feet, the Briggs Stadium upper deck was the tallest barrier in either league to clear and one that the game’s greatest sluggers from Babe Ruth down had tried and never accomplished.¹⁴ Detroit writers called it the longest homer ever hit at the stadium.

The three-run homer gave the Red Sox a 7-4 lead. Detroit scored one run in the fifth and one in the seventh. The final was 7-6 Boston, and Ted Williams had the first game-winning home run of his career, to be followed by 109 more.

It was reportedly 17 years before another batter hit one out of Detroit’s ballpark. That batter was Mickey Mantle.

Williams hit 521 homers, 248 of them at Fenway Park. Of the 273 he hit on the road, more than 20 percent were hit in Detroit. The 55 home runs he hit at Briggs Stadium far outpaced the 35 he hit at Shibe Park and the 35 he hit at Cleveland Stadium. Only one visiting player hit more; Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in Detroit. It’s no wonder Ted called Detroit his favorite park in which to hit. One wonders how many homers he would have hit had he been a Tiger his whole career.¹⁵

Boston Red Sox 10

St. Louis Browns 8 (10 innings)

May 9, 1939 — Sportsman’s Park, St. Louis

Williams’s first game-winner in extra innings came five days later in St. Louis.

The early-season Tuesday afternoon game drew only 1,589 – or 2,134 per the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.¹⁶ Jack Kramer was starting pitcher for the St. Louis Browns, only the fourth start of what became a 12-year major-league career for Kramer; he was 2-0 coming into the game.

Kramer gave up one run in the first inning and one run in the second. Shockingly, Ted Williams struck out both in the first inning and again in the second, with the bases loaded both times.

Kramer continued to struggle in the third inning, and the Red Sox scored two more runs. Harry Kimberlin relieved Kramer.

On four base hits and a sacrifice fly, with an error mixed in, the Browns got three runs back in their half of the third off Boston’s Jim Bagby Jr.

Neither side scored in the fourth or fifth.

The Red Sox extended their lead to 7-3 in the top of the sixth when Jimmie Foxx hit a three-run 450-foot homer into the distant center-field bleachers.¹⁷

In the bottom of the seventh, the Browns scored twice. Harlond Clift singled and Beau Bell homered. It was 7-5, Red Sox.

St. Louis rallied for two more runs in the bottom of the eighth, thanks to a couple of pinch-hitters. Former Red Sox outfielder Mel Almada singled off Bagby’s heel. Billy Sullivan pinch-hit for the pitcher, swung at the first pitch, and homered onto the roof of the right-field pavilion.¹⁸ The game was tied, 7-7.

In the top of the 10th, Joe Vosmik singled to right field.¹⁹ So did Foxx, who was held to a single on a ball hit off the right-field screen. Cronin struck out and was so angry with himself that, as Gerry Moore noted in his game story, he nearly threw the bat into the dugout.

Williams batted with two on and one out. He had been slumping. After his game-winning home run he’d hit on May 4, he’d gone 1-for-15. Williams’s swing was on target. He homered off reliever Ed Cole, a three-run blow. On a full count, Williams caught an inside pitch and lined it onto the chummy rightfield roof. It barely cleared the screen.²⁰ It was 10-7, Red Sox.

Needing three outs to close out the win, Heving got one, but then gave up a single and a double. Suddenly, St. Louis had something going, and one run scored on an infield out. Two relievers, one after the other, were pressed into duty. The third Red Sox pitcher of the inning walked the first man he faced. Two on, two out, a two-run lead. Clift hit a towering smash to left-center field.

With one last effort the speeding Joe [Vosmik] stuck out his glove while still going full tilt. Somehow it landed and stuck in there and the near distraught Cronin threw away his cap and raced out into left field to hug Vosmik.²¹

The Browns had amassed 17 base hits, but got only two bases on balls. The trio of Thompson, Heffner, and Bell accounted for 10 of the 17 hits. Bell had three RBIs. Foxx and Williams each had three RBIs, all on home runs. Each team left 12 men on base.

In the end, the 10th-inning Ted Williams homer and the former Brownie Vosmik’s catch resulted in a 10-8 win for the Red Sox.

Boston Red Sox 7

New York Yankees 3

July 2, 1939 — Fenway Park, Boston

(first game of a doubleheader)

This game’s win was secured by Ted Williams’s first game-winning home run off a future Hall of Famer.²²

New York’s Lefty Gomez (four 20-win seasons to his credit) opposed Lefty Grove, with eight 20-win seasons. The first-place Yankees were 12½ games ahead of second-place Boston.²³

The Yankees scored first, and Grove lost his batterymate in the first inning due to a collision at home plate. Gene Desautels was knocked cold and forced to retire for the rest of the day.²⁴ Johnny Peacock took his place. The injury was the first of seven for both teams in the doubleheader.²⁵ Adding a second run in the fourth, New York led until Jimmie Foxx walked to lead off the bottom of Boston’s fourth. Williams flied out to left field, but Joe Cronin hit a two-run homer high into the net above the left-field wall that tied the game, 2-2. Each side scored one run in the sixth.

Grove led off the bottom of the seventh and Gomez struck him out. Tom Carey singled but was forced at second on Cramer’s grounder to shortstop. Foxx walked to put two on with two outs.

This set the stage for Ted Williams. Gomez got two strikes on him, but then The Kid hit a three-run home run to deep right field. The ball carried into the right-field bleachers, a drive that went with a favoring wind, just clearing the fence as Henrich backed into the wall.²⁶ Henrich dropped as he crashed and had to be assisted off the field. Blood trickled from a cut on the right side of his head.²⁷

The Red Sox added an insurance run in the bottom of the eighth. Joe Vosmik walked and was sacrificed to second by Jim Tabor. Peacock atoned in some measure for a pair of errors earlier, singling in Vosmik.

The 7-3 score held as Grove set down the side in the ninth, the final batter being a pitcher (Red Ruffing) pinch-hitting for Gomez. Ruffing struck out.²⁸

It wasn’t yet the Fourth of July, but young Williams already had 61 runs batted in. He set a rookie record in 1939, never matched before or since, by driving in 145 runs. [Note: see the section at the end of this section entitled How many RBIs did Ted Williams have in 1939?]

The Yankees won the second game, 9-3. Williams was 0-for-2 and walked twice. He walked 107 times in 1939.

The two games together took as long to play as some single games take in the second decade of the twenty-first century: 1:53 and 2:00. In 2019 the average Red Sox-Yankees game lasted 3:24.²⁹

Boston Red Sox 9

Cleveland Indians 5

July 15, 1939 — Cleveland Stadium

The Red Sox were riding a nine-game winning streak.

Cleveland starter Willis Hudlin got bombed for five runs in the top of the first inning. With one out and runners on second and third, Williams was walked intentionally.³⁰ Hudlin then walked shortstop/manager Joe Cronin for the first run. A second scored on a groundout. Jim Tabor drove in two more with a single and Boston pitcher Fritz Ostermueller singled in another.

The Indians picked up three in the third on a bases-clearing double by Moose Solters, the third run on an error by right-fielder Williams who wasted so much time looking for the handle that all three runners scored.³¹ He did get an outfield assist, finally getting ahold of the ball and throwing out Solters who had tried to reach third base.

For the second game in a row, the Red Sox had taken a 5-0 lead but then lost it. The Indians tied it up in the bottom of the fifth on a double and an RBI single. Reliever Emerson Dickman replaced Ostermueller. Two more singles followed.

Still tied, 5-5, in the top of the eighth, Jimmie Foxx grounded out. Ted Williams blasted Johnny Broaca’s first pitch for a vicious clout into the far-off right-field stands³² which gave Boston the lead and proved sufficient for the ultimate 9-5 win. The Cleveland Plain Dealer said it landed about six rows into the stands, not far from the foul pole. The Boston Herald agreed, to the row, describing Ted the Terror slamming the ball and rejuvenating the Red Sox.³³ It was 6-5, but the next two batters combined to produce one more run. Joe Cronin singled to left, getting to second base on an error by Solters. Joe Vosmik singled over second base and into center, which drove in Cronin.

The Red Sox added two more in the top of the ninth. With one out, Bobby Doerr singled to left field. Doc Cramer hit a triple to right-center. Foxx hit a sacrifice fly nearly to the warning track in center field and Cramer tagged and scored to make it 9-5. Williams grounded out to first base unassisted. Foxx’s drive would have been a home run in many parks; it was caught 20 feet in front of Cleveland Stadium’s center-field barrier which stood some 470 feet from home plate.

Bruce Campbell pinch-hit for Allen, but grounded out to second base. Rollie Hemsley got his fifth hit, a single to left-center. Weatherly tried to bunt for a base hit, but popped up to the pitcher. Chapman grounded into a force play, Doerr to Cronin covering second base.

With 4 2/3 innings of relief work, allowing four scattered hits and no runs, Dickman earned a well-deserved win, improving his record to 4-1 with his third win in eight days.

The outcome gave the Red Sox their 10th win in a row; they won their next two games, too, sweeping the July 16 doubleheader in Detroit, 9-2 and 3-0.

Boston Red Sox 8

Washington Senators 6

August 19, 1939 — Griffith Stadium, Washington

(first game of a doubleheader)

Ted Williams’s first grand slam won this game for the Red Sox. The pitchers for the first game were two rookies: right-hander Joe Haynes for the Senators and Lefty Lefebvre (as one might intuit, a left-hander) for the Red Sox.

Neither team scored in the first three innings. Jimmie Foxx, Boston’s first baseman, hit a solo homer high into the centerfield bleachers to kick off the fourth.³⁴

The Senators took a 2-1 lead in the bottom of the fifth on a single, a force out, and three more singles, the third by Johnny Welaj, driving in two runs. The Senators added another run in the sixth and a leadoff double and Johnny Bloodworth’s single.

Boston tied it up in the top of the seventh. Third baseman Jim Tabor drew a base on balls. With one out, Lou Finney pinch-hit for Lefebvre and doubled down the right-field line, driving in Tabor and cutting Washington’s lead to 3-2. Bobby Doerr stepped in. On back-to-back wild pitches, Finney took third and then scored.

Joe Heving relieved for Boston. He retired the side in the seventh but after a double and walk in the bottom of the eighth, it was his turn for a wild pitch. Both runners advanced and he intentionally walked Bloodworth. Another pinch-hitter came through, this time for the Senators. Taft Wright pinch-hit for Vernon and doubled down the right-field line, scoring two runners.

Three outs from defeat, the Red Sox came to bat in the top of the ninth. Tabor singled to center and Peacock singled to right. Pete Appleton relieved Haynes. Heving bunted too hard and the lead runner was thrown out at third. Doerr surprised the Senators by laying down a bunt on the third-base line for a single. The bases were loaded.

Doc Cramer hit a fly ball to center field,